***  WORLD NEWS  ***

&

BOOKS 

 Both Dick Nesbitt-Dufort and Adrian Hill are published authors. Dick's father wrote a book about his experiences as a special operations pilot flying agents into Occupied France. Dick has edited and produced the memoirs of a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars. Adrian has written novels about espionage set in South Korea and Switzerland and remains the only British diplomat to have written part of the history of the US Department of State. When not organising skytours he's working on a novel set during the height of the Vietnam War.

All these books are on sale through Parapress based in Tunbridge Wells, managed by Elizabeth Imlay, herself an authoress, specialising in literary history and criticism, most recently on Charlotte Bronte. Elizabeth is also a leading light in the De Vere Society - who contend that Shakespeare's plays may have been written by Lord De Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Parapress

***

When Adrian Hill served as a diplomat one of his most rewarding jobs was Director of British Information Services across Canada. At one stage he was looking after Britain's messages across the United States as well. Apart from network and local television and radio broadcasts a key part of his job was to brief and often write editorials for the hundreds of newspapers across North America, concentrating on foreign news. These contributions proved highly popular so alongside these touring and history pages we've opened this editorial page.

 Here we try to bring some historical perspective to the latest political and military events around the World. This news page has a complimentary purpose. Although this website is about our tours we also try to promote the heritage of the Atlantic Charter and the Special Relationship. The United Nations and NATO owe their existence to the Atlantic Charter, unique among treaties in that there were no signatures, just messages to their respective cabinets from Churchill and Roosevelt on board a battleship and a cruiser anchored off Newfoundland - plus mutual trust at a time of great danger for the democracies.

Updates will occur when the news makes one worthwhile. The views expressed are personal reflections based on over thirty years military and diplomatic service in the world's hot spots including three wars.

Adrian Hill

************

BANKS

Many years ago I stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during a hectic trading day. A friend, showing me what he did for a living, explained there were only two emotions on this floor - greed and panic. On that day greed ruled. Now it's the turn of panic.

Those who make cars or run hotels can only increase their profits by improving the product so that they can sell more units or charge more money or both. Banks are the only business where you can increase profits by increasing the risk.

 This crisis will pass but when it's all over let's remember how our banks treated ordinary working customers when they over-spent a few pennies. How many people have been charged serial punitive fees by banks making enormous profits from their high street customers, thereby compounding any financial difficulties.

Never again should banks in the British Isles be allowed to regulate themselves. Banks have proved themselves inept as well as greedy and dishonest. Those huge profits filched from their everyday hardworking customers provided their directors and senior management with somebody else's money to gamble for quick bucks to line their own pockets - in markets that they couldn't be bothered to understand. A reputation for integrity and trustworthiness built over three hundred years has been left in tatters by this mediocre and shifty generation with their own South Sea Bubble. I would like to think that criminal charges and seizures of assets will follow but won't hold my breath.

Britain needs to learn from our ancestors and begin a new industrial revolution. For the last thirty years London's merchant bankers have despised manufacturing industry. Now it's time to despise the merchant bankers and start supplying the World's fast growing economies with manufactured goods. Just outside Sierre in Switzerland - which has the highest wages in Europe - you'll find a plant that makes seventy per cent of the aluminium body parts for the Globe's cars. Swiss companies are bringing manufacturing back home - quality production in China is more expensive. If the Swiss can learn fast, so must we British.

No doubt the Labour Party's salon revolutionaires are sharpening their knives to cut the defence budget to save politically correct social engineering while paying for failed banks. Word of warning - our defence industries are the last bunker of Britain's once famed manufacturing skills. Warships, submarines, jet-fighters, missiles, armoured vehicles are built by a dwindling pool of highly skilled designers and engineers, the only launch pad for any industrial growth. Far from slashing defence this is the moment when the government should actually increase the armed forces budget. Leaving aside our safety, by doing so they will expand the pool of skilled people and boost scientific creativity.

Only the British Government has the muscle to restore confidence in British money and respect for the City of London as a World Financial Centre - where money is in safe and reliable hands - and if this requires public mass hangings, the sooner the better. 

NATO AND RUSSIA

We are not at war with the Russian people. They must deal with Mister Putin. We can't do the job for them. We regret their country's short-lived membership of the democracies which ended at the last election when a clique of KGB pensioners hi-jacked the electoral process and eased themselves into the driving seat. First they attacked the free media then gradually closed it down. Sadly a new cold war began when a former FSB colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London - a crime that logically could only have involved the Russian State and thereby Mister Putin given the incompetents who left a trail of radioactivity across London.

When Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas Hume kicked out 105 Russian KGB and GRU agents from London in 1971 - I had their lengthy list of sabotage targets on my desk - there was little surprise nor much reaction from the Kremlin. Thet still had 300 people in London though hardly any spies. Assuming that the Russian government was involved in Litvinenko's murder, why is there still a Russian Embassy in London? It should have been closed. Russia's government disqualified itself from G 8 membership and that organisation should offer the World's largest democracy and Commonwealth Member, India, the seat now occupied by Russia. Russia should be removed from the UN Security Council. All negotiations between the WTO and Russia should cease. New restrictions on the sale of technology and investment in Russia should be brought into effect as a matter of urgency.

 Britain is in a unique situation among EC member states. Only two per cent of our gas supply comes from Russia. Whatever the rest of the EC decide, Britain should curtail trade with Russia. We import twice as much as we export anyhow. We don't need Russian investment. There is no case of a Russian investment permanently improving the British economy and I discard a few art purchases. Moreover, do we really want state run industries, answerable to the Kremlin, owning parts of British industry? Definitely not. Investment from friends such as Abu Dhabi are welcome. Investment in Russia is extremely risky. BP have put billions into Russia's oil fields yet look as though they have been taken for a ride by their state industry partners. Other investors from Europe have also lost big money. No more investment in Russia should be encouraged let alone assisted by the British Government. No more visas should be issued to Russian government officials and state industry personnel for any reason - why should Mister Putin's cronies invade the London shops when Georgians are told to apply for Russian passports simply to return to their own homes. 

Georgia reminds of Hitler's 1936 march into the Rhineland. After the First World War agreement was reached that the parts of Germany alongside France should become demilitarised. Then along came Hitler who decided to bluff his way into the Rhineland. He sent a few infantry battalions and an artillery battalion across the Rhine. Hitler wrote afterwards that this was his most nervous moment. General Heinz Guderian - perhaps his best general - after the war told his interrogators that if the French had called Hitler's bluff and marched into the Rhineland themselves the handful of German troops would have run for their lives and Hitler would have been thrown from power. Instead the French and British offered nothing save weasel words and Hitler realised that he could nibble away at the German speaking bits of Czechoslovakia. Finally he demanded a corridor through Poland to the German speaking port of Danzig - sounds familiar?

Russia's military power is a shadow of its strength during the Cold War. The army is riddled with corruption and the navy's submarine crews have to be rescued by our naval experts. NATO member Turkey has a larger and probably more combat ready army than Russia's. Saddam Hussein's army was about half the size of the present Russian Army though very similar in structure. I wonder why? Intelligent generals in Russia know what the American, British and Allied forces did to Saddam's army - twice within just over a decade - and in the face of strong defences. Don't be fooled like the media by planted stories of Russia's missiles and radar. One aspect that holds back the Americans is the mess left behind in Russia's nuclear forces after the collapse of the Soviet Union. American experts need access to continue safely demolishing the old Soviet nuclear arsenal. What holds back the Continental members of NATO is dependence on Russia for gas and oil supplies - and their rash disarmament after the Berlin Wall tumbled. They halved their armed forces. Before the wall came down Germany's army included eighty-six panzer battalions. Today there are six. Switzerland has more panzer battalions than Germany. The strongest panzer formation today on German soil is the British Ist Armoured Division.

That aside, Britain's recent governments have been more irresponsible than Germany's. Blair and Brown sent our armed forces into two wars yet carried on slashing the defence budget as though peace reigned. Those of us who served in the Armed Forces regard this empty-headed arrogance as nothing less than criminal. The opposition Conservatives are no better and need to change their thinking on defence. It doesn't matter any longer whether the Georgian president is a fool. Democracy is under direct attack, one of our number has been invaded and effectively occupied. Putin's ambition is to remove the democratically elected government and replace it with a regime along the lines of his own. If we really want to send a message to the people of Eastern Europe including the Russians the size of Britain's armed forces should double. The Royal Navy should more than double to restore balance to a fleet which lacks surface ships and submarines. We can no longer send our fleet to the Arabian Sea while leaving these islands without defence. Our navy requires enough ships, submarines and aircraft to do both. We should build not two super-carriers but four, possibly even five and a matching force of escorts and support ships. The RAF should have every fighter it ordered and more because we should rebuild our forces in Germany. The Army needs proper reserves of men and equipment, double the size of our standing army. What better way to boost our hard-pressed manufacturing in these difficult times. Deterrence is much cheaper than war.

 Sending the Secretary of State to Georgia and the Britain's Foreign Secretary to Kiev for puffing hot air will not strengthen our armed forces nor frighten Mister Putin. And such limelight seeking won't fool the American and British peoples into believing that the situation is under control. President Sarkosy has set himself a watershed task and intends to secure a complete withdrawal from Georgia. The situation is dangerous. Lack of resolve and retribution, no visible consequences, all simply encourage further gambles. The US Vice President would have done better to drop into Ankara and tell the Turks they had better prove themselves a little braver as NATO partners if they want to earn a welcome in the EC. Or are they only good at bullying tiny Cyprus and minorities such as the Christians in their own country? Turkey should open the Bosporus to the US Navy and its skies to the hundreds of American and British aircraft based next door in Iraq. While Putin sees a large NATO member dither he will grab a little more of Georgia - and elsewhere - each passing day. Already he thinks that supplying the latest anti-aircraft defences to Iran is a way of getting even with America rather than a green light for Israel to demolish Iran's nuclear programme. We have the insult of Russia offering its corrupt police to train the Afghans and the spectacle of the Afghan president accepting. I wonder if all the other Afghans have forgiven Russia for its decade of vicious war - no doubt the policemen will find out for themselves. People like Mister Putin see only stage one, they rarely notice the axe descending on their thick necks.

We have enough threats to our freedoms without adding Mister Putin to the wanted poster. And here we come back to the Russian people. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the door opened into the industrial democracies and our high priced markets. Despite all the corruption and horrendous inequalities in Russia many of its ordinary citizens have seen their standard of living transformed although too many more have not. Europe's energy purchases benefit only the Russian government. Foreign investment drives growth in Russia, not the Kremlin who sit on huge dollar reserves apart from the sums they spend on new weapons and their own comforts. Foreign investment in Russia has become too risky. Investors are pulling out and few take their place. Now the markets are in panic melt down. While telling us to close our door, Putin is soothing the Russian people through his controlled media that this matters nought; Russia can return to isolation without poverty. Recent evidence points the other way.

***************

Anyone taking our Normandy sky tour finds it helpful to have an idea of the scale of Operation Overlord. Their Finest Hour, Map Table and The Special Relationship are worth a glance to understand some of the events before America's entry into the Second World War. Many visitors to our website probably know much of what is explained on these pages. Please grant us your forbearance. We try to ensure that those less familiar with the background to D Day, particularly the young, start their tour with a sound conception of what was at stake thereby making their time with us all the more worthwhile and enjoyable.

OUR VIRTUAL D DAY TOUR HAS LOTS OF PHOTOS OF THE LEGENDARY SITES TODAY

SEE ALSO

CHURCHILL COLLEGE  CAMBRIDGE

AIRBORNE FORCES              THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP                MAP TABLE          

             THEIR FINEST HOUR        TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH         OUR SKY GUIDES          STOP PRESS          OUR TOURS PAGE